Translation of activities in a global virtual teams software development: agile vs. waterfall

Abstract

The waterfall software development approach and traditional project management have been the dominant approaches used for software development for many years among collocated teams and global teams alike. In recent years, agile development approaches such as Scrum, XP, Kanban, and Scrumban have increasingly gained popularity in practice, and they are the dominant software development approach among start-ups and Silicon Valley companies. While waterfall is still being used among very large traditional companies, there is a gradual move toward agile by many of these companies. This is often referred to as agile transformation. Global software teams have to constantly struggle with the appropriate software development approach for global projects. More often than not, the choice is left to the teams, and sometimes the dominant software development practice in the organizations will be adopted by the global teams. This study explores global virtual software team development practices and tries to demystify some of the misconceptions about global software development practices based on findings from the global virtual software team experiment that was carried out at DePaul University from 2011-2018. The moments of translation from the perspective of actor-network theory (ANT) was employed in the data analysis to examine how the development approach was selected by the global virtual teams. One of the key findings from the research is that the success of a global software development project does not have a strong dependency on the development approach. While one agrees that it is one of the key influencing factors, there are other equally strong factors for global virtual software team success.